On rewards and excitement

Ercarret

Intro

There's one thing that I've been thinking about ever since the gifting event last year. Since I was seeing that event from the perspective of two accounts – my main (Thronebreaker) and my alt (Act 4 completion) – I realized what that nagging feeling in the back of my head was. I've been having that feeling for a while but haven't – until now – been able to fully put it into words.

Excitement or the lack thereof

I think there's a real lack of excitement in terms of rewards as a Thronebreaker. Of course there are things to strive after, especially with Paragon being on the horizon and Act 7 offering up a 3-4 gem upon exploration. There are nexus crystals and rank-up gems found here and there, and they are all fun to earn.

But...you don't. They can be found in story content but not in a whole bunch of other contexts where exciting rewards also need to be found in order for those things to be fun and worthwhile. Whether it's the big boy events like the gifting events or smaller things like the current rifts, I've often found myself feeling very dejected by the rewards I'm earning lately.

I used to find rifts absolutely riveting. There was the possibility of amazing rewards, with very little risk of something absolutely abysmal. As a Thronebreaker, the opposite is true. There is basically nothing in there that truly excites me, at least not as a single pull, and extremely many duds. I've so far used all of my keys on 6* shards which has been neat. However, 1350 shards are not, by themselves, very exciting. It's just over 10% of a full crystal, or just under 10% if you're going for a featured crystal (which I always do).

This feeling in the back of my head got even more pronounced during the gifting event. I don't think I've ever opened as many gifting crystals as I did last year, yet I never got anything that I would qualify as ”exciting”. I did get the occasional useful thing so it was by no means a wash, but that event just reinforced my belief that the game has gotten quite...boring? Is that the word? I think it might be.

An alternative experience

Meanwhile, on my alt account, I got all kinds of rewards that were exciting for a lower-level player. The top pulls were a 6* Thanos and a 5* Nexus crystal. Those were amazing rewards! There was real excitement there in a way I haven't felt for a couple of years on my main. Even if I didn't pull anything interesting aside from the ISO and the gold, the sheer amount of ISO and gold I pulled was really exciting by itself.

Now that the rifts came back, I was reminded of when they were here previously. In earlier years, when I was Uncollected and Cavalier, you could look forward to pulling a featured 5* crystal or a 5* awakening gem, both of which were both amazing rewards and well worth spending your limited keys to get given where I was in the game.

As a Thronebreaker, I'm missing those kinds of rewards. I'm missing those special things that I would go out of my way of getting, rather than just a certain percentage more of t5b, t2a or a new 6* crystals.

Conclusion

I feel like we are at a crossroads of sorts. I think the game needs an influx of rewards that are exciting for endgame players. If we can't see the 6* equivalents of what used to be so exciting about 5* champions (such as featured crystals and awakening gems), what other options are there? What other rewards can be offered to bridge that gap? And can this be done without a higher difficulty altogether?

I think it could. We've already seen an example of this in the Summer of Pain. Different progression tiers got different objectives to complete during the same content, with wildly different rewards. This could perhaps allow Thronebreaker players (and, soon, Paragon ones) to play the same content as Cavalier players while still getting rewards more geared towards them. Just like with the SOP objectives, they could of course ramp up the difficulty in order to justify the rewards.

What these rewards could be, I honestly don't know at this moment. I just know that the current ones don't cut it.